News Features

Not the only ones

Portland Museum of Art in financial trouble

By JEFF INGLIS | February 11, 2009

Arts and culture go begging: The Portland Symphony Orchestra go begging. By Emily Parkhurst.

For the February 1 start of its fiscal year, the Portland Museum of Art laid off six people — three of them full-time staffers. The museum had previously employed 46 full-timers and 30 part-time workers, according to Kristen Levesque, the museum's marketing and public-relations director.

The positions were not top staff — in December, the museum hired a new curator of modern and European art, and incoming museum director Mark Bessire starts March 2. Rather, the layoffs were in administrative, facilities, membership sales, and cafè positions, Levesque told the Phoenix.

"The museum's endowment, like so many non-profits, has been affected by the downturn in the economy," according to a statement from acting director Tom Denenberg. The museum had a budget of nearly $4.6 million last year, just over one-third of which comes from income from the endowment, which was as high as $35 million, but now is down to $24 million, Denenberg said in a subsequent interview. He added that the present year's budget, which just took effect, has been reduced to just shy of $4.2 million.

Nevertheless, both Denenberg and Levesque say that the museum's day-to-day operations are strong. The current show, "Backstage Pass: Rock & Roll Photography," is the second most-successful show in the museum's history, beating out last January's "Bright Common Spikes" show of works by John Bisbee. The museum's all-time top audience draw was "In Praise of Nature: Ansel Adams and the Photographs of the American West," in January 2000. (All three shows were sponsored by the Portland Phoenix.)

Movies are moving, hot dogs are hopping, Binga's is burning
Even as the temperatures drop and we head into hibernation mode for winter, Portland's drinking, dining, nightlife, and shopping scenes continue to evolve. Here's a round-up of comings and goings.
Summer people
Ever wonder why there is so much professional-level art made and shown in Maine, a state with a total population less than that of many minor cities? One answer is that following the fame of people like Winslow Homer, creative types flocked to Maine, often to artists' colonies.
Hope and energy
As we launch into the next decade with a collapsing economy and apocalyptic themes bleeding into every facet of culture, it's particularly hard to be optimistic about the arts, as yes, they are often the first to go.
Cut it out
"Collage: Piecing it Together" at the Portland Museum of Art is a somewhat rambling look at a process that came into use in the beginning of the 20th century as a cubist process bringing images, colors, and shapes together that were previously used elsewhere.
Poetic sense
For the last end-of-the-year review I had to rely on the kindness and opinions of others, having just started reviewing again after a long hiatus.
Selective strife
Portland Museum of Art’s “In Our Time: The World as Seen By Magnum Photographers,” is quite literally a catalogue of the most virtuosic photojournalistic photographs in the last half-century.
Rain check
We have just the thing to cure your summer-vacation blues: Maine, from the inside.
Growing Maine art
Long ago an art critic of my acquaintance remarked that New York was a border town to Europe, and until fairly recently that was true. Artistic ideas would be born in Europe, often France, and migrate slowly across the Atlantic and take root.
Review: ''Backstage Pass'' at the PMA
The half-century chronology covered by the Portland Museum of Art's latest exhibition, "Backstage Pass," reveals in photographic portraiture a story of music that is a euphemism for the ultimate creative act. Like sex, rock-and-roll is about surrender to the present moment.
Re-structuring
Three large oil paintings overwhelm the lobby at the Portland Museum of Art, introducing the show "Division and Discovery: Recent Works by Frederick Lynch," a beautiful and meditative collection found on the fourth floor of the museum.
The thinking ass
Before his imagery got captured and turned into poster art backdrops for dorm-room bong-hits, Salvador Dalí imagined it in service of a revolution in consciousness. “Accommodations of Desire: Surrealist Works on Paper Collected by Julien Levy,” at the Portland Museum of Art through this spring, traces the stages and offshoots of this revolution along the axis established by one crucial figure in its history and its dissemination — collector and dealer Julien Levy.
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